I am not one to read your mind, nor have I claimed that you have some hidden agenda. What I have claimed is that you are motivated to get this through for whatever reasons. What are your motivations (disclosed or not)? Well, my response to that is to be found earlier in this paragraph.

Playing games and playing post-padding games are not the same thing. The latter seems to run afoul of a TOS noted earlier while the former does not necessarily do so.

Bingo. There's been a lot of "off-thread" discussion about this matter even before the proposal came up this time.

If this gets voted down, this won't be the last time this thing comes up. And if it gets voted in, it won't be the last time something is advanced for the same reasons as this.

I'm still curious what the explicit "problem" is that will be addressed by this but cannot be addressed by things that already exist and are in play?

If something's not broken, what's going to be fixed by a "fix"?

I agree and I think the suggestion by tom911 is an excellent one:

Not a stupid question at all. It is a very good question.

Can we get an answer from this motion's sponsors please? Thanks!

Just do away with post counts completely.

Let's face it, we are all addicted to accumulating points. Post counts are the same!

Do away with Omni once more.

If you are not going to do away with post counts, then the OP has the right idea.

If you are not going to do away with Omni, then the OP still has the right idea.

Do not count Omni posts...past, present and future.

I'm still confused by the whole conspiracy/hidden agenda thing. It seems to me this is a pretty straight-forward issue.

Asked and answered:

I stopped posting on Flyertalk some years ago. In part, this was caused by the institutional "status" imposed on those who post nothing or little related to travel, in comparison to their posting on off-travel related subjects. Over my years of travel, I have communicated with a number of others who feel that the core purpose of this website is compromised when a small group of individuals with limited desire to participate in travel related conversation become prominent in the board by means of their post count/participation in off topic subjects.

I think that as a symbol, eliminating post count incrementing from Omni posts would make a valuable statement to the entire community about the real core topic of this entire website.

I support it, and I'd urge others who'd like to see Flyertalk move back in the direction of being primarily travel related do the same.

It is broken. As referenced above (and I am not going to reread this whole thread)

10,000 posts in an omni game:td: (I still don't believe in tallying post counts...but for those of you who use post counts to see how "reliable" an FTer is)

etc!

The person that uses the post count as a measure of reliability is what is broken. @:-)

It ought to be ... and it's one that the current TOS covers.

What if the welcome text when someone registered for FT contained a section on post counts with a disclaimer such as:

As referenced below, what's broken in your scenario is people's ability to properly make their own judgments:

Even if this proposal were to pass, it's not going to positively impact my FT experience -- so I don't see what it's going to fix. And this proposal will do nothing to improve FTers' abilities to make their own judgment calls.

Let's face it... OMNI is a playground (or a sewer depending upon how you look at it). I post there occasionally because it's entertaining. Entertaining as it may be, it has nothing to do with travel, which (as near as I can tell) is the purpose of this website.

I have 1,470 posts of which 273 (18.5%) are in OMNI. How do I know this? I just looked it up. Before doing that, I couldn't have told you within 1,000 posts how many I have. Delete them? Sure... whatever... I would hope that most of us have more important things to worry about than how many posts we've made on an internet website.

What arguments of that "school" won you over?